What does 21st Century learning mean to you? That is the question for our #peel21st community “blog hop.” Check out my response below then hop on over to someone else’s site listed at the bottom of this post.

A few weeks ago, I overheard one of my vocational students say, “This class drains me.” I knew how she felt. Frankly, I never want to create or mark another worksheet.

I jumped in with both feet when I returned to the classroom this fall in my academic classes—passion projects, inquiries, social media and lots of tech tools. It’s been fun and very challenging. However, I was scared to try student-centred learning with my needier students that are less predictable or motivated.

“Just do it!” I told myself. So we recently started an inquiry on stars followed by learning by creating models of galaxies and other deep-space features. We definitely need to work on community norms and teamwork, but I already see more light in their eyes and smiles on their faces. I’ll never go back to worksheets.

Since I am finishing my 3 years in the Instructional Technology Resource Teacher role, I’ve had several people ask me lately which Learning Management System (LMS) I will be using when I go back to the classroom in September. The choices are many–Desire2Learn (D2L), Google Apps for Education (GAFE), Office 365, Edmodo and blogging platforms to name a few. There’s also been a lot of talk about each system in my online network in the last few weeks, mostly due to the OTRK12 conference and Google Summit.

Frankly, I’ve been pretty disappointed in the tone of these online conversations. The tone is: “If you are not using ________, you’re not as smart as me.” Or better yet: “You’re just a sheep.” It doesn’t really matter which system, they all have their evangelists.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe, we are a part of this flow.

Alec Couros gave a presentation this evening for PDSB’s MFO Leadership Launch. I often tweet “in the moment” during a presentation and I sent a couple of tweets at the time. However, Alec was autotweeting his videos and websites and that somehow gave me permission to put down my phone and just listen. I laughed and I cried. I cheered little Audri and his success on the Rube Goldberg Monster Trap. I wanted to contribute to the conversation, but could not find the words to sum up my learning. Continue reading

This map still works for Flicker and Twitter, but the controls have changed. Zoom in to the desired location, click on the layers button, sign in with Twiter and change the tags in the social tab to your hashtag. Images of controls are not exactly the same as the current map.

The map below allows you to search Flickr, Twitter and Youtube for geo-located social media posts. The tag that is currently mapped is “weather” but you can change the tag by clicking on the gear icon. Continue reading

After watching Darren Kuropatwa’s #WhileWalking 66 posted by Amy Burvall in Google+, I started thinking about tags as a part of digital literacy. I am not a very good user of tags. I have been struggling with choosing consistent, clear tags since Delicious switched away from stacks.

“Blogging tips” websites indicate that you should do some research to find the most commonly used terms in your field. However, finding a list of keywords or tags for Educational Technology through a Google search is an exercise in futility since all sites include the word “tag”. Instead I did a very haphazard, non-academic search of tags people are using on their blogs to find the most common. Using Tagxedo, I found the top 100 tag words look like this (see below for how this image was made):

Since Tagxedo only uses individual words, the compound word tags are not shown, but this image does give an overview of what we are talking about. As I make my tags in the future, I will endeavour to use these words alone or in combination in addition to my own idiosyncrasies.

Out of curiosity, I fed the ETMOOC blog feed into Wordle and this is the image created. It will be interesting to see what will change as we move into Digital Literacy.

How I made the Tagxedo:

I thought that I would be able to see tags on other people’s blogs. This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds since many blogs do not list their tags. Visiting at least 100, I copied the tag lists from 33 blogs into a Word document. To choose the blogs, I started with the current postings (on Feb. 17, 2013) in the ETMOOC blog hub feed. Then I looked through all the blogs from James Dykstra’s (@mrpuffin) Twitter list of Canadian Educational Folk. I also added a few blogs from people I follow. Once I felt I had enough “data”, I copied the full Word document into Tagxedo. The application automatically choose the most frequently used words.